Matthew Milliner

So they’ve done it. Andrew and Sarah Wilson, tracing Luther’s 1510 journey from Erfurt to Rome , have finally crossed the Tiber. And I mean that literally. They reached their destination. Ecumenism can be the lightheaded pursuit of the touchy-feely crowd who don’t like to think hard . . . . Continue Reading »

Joe reports that most teenagers aren’t sexually active in America today. In his Bancroft Prize-winning biography of Jonathan Edwards, George Marsden provides some historical contrast. Here is the skinny on pre-marital sex in eighteenth century Puritan New England: “Bundling,” which . . . . Continue Reading »

In her explosively intelligent book Empress and Handmaid , Sarah Jane Boss contrasts medieval images of the Virgin with contemporary pornography: Whereas the worshipper before the Virgin in Majesty is the servant of the Lord and Lady whose presence the statue conveys, the actors in the pornographic . . . . Continue Reading »

“The most beautiful painting in the world,” Raphael’s Transfiguration, belongs not in a museum but in a liturgical setting, the master of pontifical ceremonies and a scholar of liturgy and sacred art recently declared in the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, speaking of a painting that now sits is the Vatican’s own Pinacoteca Museum… . Continue Reading »

As an undergraduate years ago, those of us in the Wheaton College art crowd piled into a fifteen passenger van for an unusual studio visit. We drove into Chicago to the home/studio of artist Tim Lowly whose work—we were told—is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which in . . . . Continue Reading »

The Gray Lady appears to agree with Micah about Stephen Hawking being something of a bore this time around: The real news about “The Grand Design,” however, isn’t Mr. Hawking’s supposed jettisoning of God . . . The real news about “The Grand Design” is how . . . . Continue Reading »

“Mary Immaculate precedes all others, including obviously Peter himself and the Apostles.”  - John Paul II,  Mulieris Dignitatem “Thou goest to a woman?  Do not forget thy whip!”  - Nietzsche,  Thus Spoke Zarathustra . . . . Continue Reading »

Rusty Reno asked me why we can’t build like Ralph Adams Cram envisioned. The answer to that question, I think, is the architectural equivalent to what Reno himself said about education: “Fearful of living in dreams and falling under the sway of ideologies, we have committed ourselves to . . . . Continue Reading »

I recently came across the following passage from the architect Ralph Adams Cram’s commencement address at the Yale School of Fine Arts (as it was then called), published in The Ministry of Art (1914): The artist is bound and controlled by the laws of his art, but doubly is he bound by his . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1995, when I was a college sophomore (in more ways than one), I drove from New Jersey to California with a med school dropout named Becky, in pursuit of some derivative of Jack Kerouac’s open-road fantasia. Rebelling against the Christianity that was far too normative for our adventurous . . . . Continue Reading »